The National and Massachusetts Red Cross say there is a “Blood Crisis” and they are making emphatic appeals for Donors. A December 26 NYT published in the Globe said (in part):
“The pandemic has caused many supply-chain bottlenecks in everyday life, but few are as critical as the United States’ ever-shrinking blood banks. For the American Red Cross, which supplies about 40 percent of the nation’s blood, and other nonprofit blood centers, the problem lies mostly at the top of the chain: the diminishing number of healthy donors.”
I don’t think so, since Thanksgiving I have not been able to find a whole blood donation appointment in my area. Even the donor center run by the Red Cross shows no appointments, or tempts me saying “1 appointment left” until I click to book and then “Sorry Full”.
I think the problem is either with Red Cross staff shortages or shortages of blood drive sites in the community and NOT a donor shortage. However, if the Red Cross said “there is a blood shortage because we cannot support a sufficient volume of appointments to maintain the usual blood supply” that isn’t as convenient a message for them, so they announce a “Blood Crisis” and are appealing for donors.
I’ll go right away if you expand your bandwidth.
I won’t do “Power Red” “Platelet” or “Plasma” as I’d rather not have my blood centrifuged and some part returned to me with the FDA acceptable level of cell damage and the FDA acceptable level of plasticizers added. I do see a few of these appointments available, but I’d rather make a one way donation, as that has worked well for me 65+ times so far.
Yup. I’m signed up for Valentine’s day. It was the earliest I could find a few days ago. I almost always have a hard time finding available slots, although they have improved their site significantly in the last few months. Maybe people are really responding to their breathless emails?
I had similar experiences with the Red Cross long before the pandemic. I don’t think it’s a very well-managed organization. I donate exclusively through UCLA Blood and Platelet Center; other than the arduous drive to Westwood, it’s always seamless. If you want to donate, I recommend looking into other organizations.
I can only speak for my area. The shortage is real. The good news is that once the word was put out, people responded (mostly people who had donated before). I managed to get an appointment last week with the local bloodbank (San Diego Bloodbank), and I asked about the response. They said they were swamped…and short-staffed due to COVID.
I didn’t use the Red Cross but rather Hudson Valley Blood Services (which may not be their name any more but oh well). I donated last Sunday and signed up two days before. They also told me the shortage is acute. (I know, I know, they always say that.)
On the other hand, @cormac262 's mention of short-staffing is spot on. I had a 12:30 appointment and it was 1:45 before I got a chair for my double-red donation.
…no appointments for the default search of the next 14 days, okay. But the website has a bug that prevents you changing the search date range. If you change the end date, it also changes the start date to equal the end date. Maybe a rather more productive thing they could do would be to invest $100 on getting an intern to test their website and fix the trivial bugs that stop people searching for an appointment?
I’m not seeing a shortage of available appointments where I am. I usually donate in Wilmington, NC and the first available appointment is February 6, a week from tomorrow. They have available appointments on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of that week. I already have an appointment for January 31 and February 7 for platelet donation.
I didn’t log in with my user ID on the website, and when I tried to leave without making an appointment a giant popup window appeared with a phone number to call if I had any trouble finding an appointment at a convenient time for me. It seemed pretty proactive to me.
Since COVID started, I walked up to a couple of different advertised blood drives on a whim, only to find that they were cancelled due to insufficient reservations. The walk-up donation system just isn’t working anymore in the COVID world and they really need people to reserve in advance. Even after I started reserving, I found that my pint of super-special O-neg blood sometimes wasn’t enough to keep the event from getting cancelled.
I started using my local community blood bank instead. They stick to a few main facilities and they always have at least one walk-up appointment available. But I do make reservations, now that I understand how critically they need reservations to help allocate scarce resources. No cancellations so far (knock on wood).
I just checked for local blood drives. And i found lots of scattered appointments. But i was surprised to see that there weren’t any “we’ll draw a pint of blood” appointments. There were “power red”, and “AB plasma”, and platelet appointments, but no whole blood.
I did see a couple of blood drives that I’d guess are traditional whole blood affairs, but they were all fully booked.
I wonder if they find it more efficient to do the specialized types when resources are scarce? My sister works for the Red Cross, i wonder if she knows.
Up here in far northern coastal California our principal collection organization is a community blood bank. It is usually possible to get in for any type of donation within two days. I personally donate plasma so I schedule my donations to the 30 day waiting period.
I just asked my sister. Yes, it’s their bandwidth. There is a critical shortage of blood, but their model has been to collect whole blood in off-site blood drives, at schools and businesses and libraries and places like the Masons. A lot of those are closed, or have reduced capacity such that they don’t want to have a lot of people congregating as they do at a blood drive. So the red cross (and the whole system) is dangerously short of blood, but also short of appointments to accept donations.
You can still donate platelets, power red, and AB plasma because those have been done at red cross facilities, which are still open. But it’s not like they have a big empty room sitting there that they could use to collect whole blood.
I pointed out to her that it’s silly to solicit donors if they can’t offer them appointments, and it would make more sense to solicit schools and such to provide space. But of course she’s just a powerless peon, and doesn’t even know who might make that kind of decision.
What’s the reason they can’t switch to collecting whole blood at their facilities, in addition to blood components? The place where I donate takes whatever you want to give. Again, Red Cross does not seem well-managed. We’re almost two years into this thing.
I would theorize that they’re trying to get the most efficiency out of their resources, but I never thought I’d see the day the Red Cross would turn down a pint of whole O-negative. I don’t understand the economics in play here.
LifeSouth is always ready to take my blood, and it directly benefits my local community (more or less), so that’s where I go now.
Presumably that if they switch some of the appointments to whole blood they don’t have capacity for the double red, AB plasma, and platelet donations they are still processing. And it’s not like there’s any excess of any of those. In fact, i suspect the power red is currently substituting for whole blood, and yields a higher “effective output” per bed used.
But i agree that they don’t seem well-managed. Local hospitals were able to rent hotel space for vaccination clinics. I’d have thought the red cross could do something similar if they can’t find enough places to do blood drives.
Or they could stay open longer, or put up tents in the parking lot. Incidentally, a whole blood donation is much quicker than everything else, so unless all their chairs are occupied every minute, I think they could squeeze them in.
They have very few open appointments. So yes, all their chairs are full all the time.
And no, they can’t set up stuff like that outdoors. Even if they had rights to the space (they don’t) it’s too hot or too cold most of the year here for that to be a good option. Like, maybe for a special weekend here or there…
But even so, they’d need to rent the space. May as well rent proper indoor space.
Which… The hospitals all did. Honestly, there’s no reason the red cross couldn’t have done that, too. Even some hospitals that i know to be badly run managed to rent space to set up vaccination clinics during the major vaccination surge.
So the problem is: they normally get most of their whole blood from blood drives at various places—schools, businesses, etc.; but those are mostly canceled and/or have few participants due to the pandemic.
Why don’t they just have blood drives but instead of schools and businesses make them available to anyone who signs up online (until full) and do them in parking lots at i.e. public libraries or Wal-Marts or where-ever. Do it by appointment with all the appropriate precautions in place.
ETA: I see puzzlegal has mentioned that outside could be problematic due to weather. Fine–someone will donate indoor space to them, I’m sure.
Typically, the needle-in-arm time for a double red cell donation is about 3x as long as it is for a whole blood donation. Again, management. If you’re spending 3x as long to collect only twice as much of just one of three usable components, and you’re turning away potential donors when there’s a shortage, you just might not be all that good at your job.